When you see a 79-year-old living idol refer to his mentor’s name half a dozen times in a 60 minutes talk, you got to pay attention to it. I had this unique opportunity to listen to Warren Buffett and Bill Gates at a town hall event at Columbia Business School. I got more than a few sparks to think about, but one I believe I should share with everyone is the importance of Ben Graham for Warren Buffett.

You will say that there can only be one Ben Graham and one Warren Buffett in a generation. True, but that’s not the point here. The point here is to find a true mentor, an individual who inspires you, someone who makes you excited to talk to and work for and make you a better person. Ben Graham was a great professional mentor to Warren Buffett, someone whose values he lives up to and applies in his work even to this date.

Many of us will find our parents as inspiration to live up to. They are possibly the best personal mentors one can ever have and the easy thing here is, you got them when you were born. In your professional life, it’s a bit harder than that. I asked someone lot smarter than me: how do you know that this is the Ben Graham for you? The answer: it’s more of a realization than anything else. If that’s the person who energizes you to stay up at night and get things done, if that’s someone who motivates you to jump out of bed early in the morning and that’s the person you can refer to in order to crack the toughest codes, you found what you were looking for.

Good luck!

New media, communities, customer intelligence and targeted marketing. Speak of them and the first thing that comes to mind is technology. Of course technology enabled all this to happen, but it is not about the technology. Technology is the enabler here, but it’s about how you adopt the technology and how well you consume it.

New media is there for all. People talk about everything. They search and research for things they buy. Technology empowered them to have access to unlimited information at their fingertips. Now it’s about how you, as a company or organization, can use the new media and reach your customers, how you can create interactive channels, how you can come out of the traditional media shells and meet your customers where they reside.

Communities are great platform for you to talk to your customers. Connected people, powerful devices and web-based platform can provide you all you need to interact with your customers. You got all the tools, so now it’s about how well you use them. It’s about how you take in the input from your customers, how welcome and important you make them feel and how you use the platform to promote your objective.

There’s large amount of data available to mine intelligence about your customers. Using data extraction and mining technology, you can find in-depth information about your customers. It’s about how you use this information, how you make your message more appealing to your audience and how you implement changes to provide the best products to your customers.

Technology is a great enabler. Over the ages it has opened new avenues and empowered us in new ways. That’s not going to stop. A decade from now, you will get something more revolutionary to make the current new media and customer intelligence seem traditional. The important thing is to accept it and make it about how we can use it and make the most of it.

Market research is one of the most fascinating areas in the world of marketing. Companies spend billions of dollars each year on getting market research done. Nielsen, one of the pioneers in the field of market research, made $3.7 billion in 2006 to find which product sells, which TV programs people watch and which music and books were getting consumed. Whether it’s a washing detergent or a presidential candidate, market research has its role to play.

A survey based market research has a huge dependence on a couple of things: what questions are being asked to the people and the sample of people to which the questions are being asked. The basic shortfall of such a market research is that the results can be skewed by tampering either one of these parameters. Plus the opinion of the target group is limited to the objective questions asked and to add to that the consensus building exercise is closed and constraint.

Another way to do market research is by using the social media. People talk about your product, their problems and how they are trying to solve them on social networks. They discuss and critic. Researchers can monitor conversations people have on various social network and infer what people want using these conversations. To make these conversations more fruitful, the company can host discussions. It can provide a community platform to customers and marketers to facilitate direct communication. This community – controlled and monitored – can be analysed by the researchers to reach to a consensus with the help of direct customer participation.

A community based market research has a few key advantages. The information gathered is broader as compared to what is gathered through surveys providing researchers reasoning behind a customer’s poll choice. And the consensus is built in an open environment, with active customer interaction, making it more credible and effective.

What do you want in your advertisement? Something that people like, appreciate and get excited about. Something unique that can help them link to your brand. An effective advertisement campaign has a singular theme for all mediums which can be identified by the customers. A good way to design that theme is by using the social media.

Marketers can monitor various elements of web-based social world to identify what people think about their product, which part of their product most excites them and what are the turn-offs. They can monitor what people generally look for when they are shopping. Using this information effectively, and designing advertisements by keeping in mind the factors that will appeal to the customers, marketers can design better advertisements as compared to the ones designed in a silo.

To take it a step further, a company can have their own community where it can interact with its customers. By having discussions on their domain, marketers can extract customer intelligence on the conversations taking place. They can conduct polls and surveys, have healthy discussions and better understand what clicks for their customers. Essentially, by doing this, marketers will be in a way able to indirectly run themes by the customers and come up with campaigns that are most influential in the community.

The idea here is to take help of your most engaged customers in designing the marketing campaigns. Creativity in designing the advertisements is as important as anything else, but just imagine how much more impactful that can be when you are hitting the right strokes in the right style!

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” This famous quotation from Henry Ford puts listening to customers and innovation opposite to each other. It is quite possible that if Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they might have said that they want to travel faster, putting both at the same side. Though the important thing to note here is that Ford didn’t ask customers and came up with arguably the biggest innovation of the industrial age. The question this raises is an important one: can you innovate without listening to the customers?

Companies put a lot of focus on what customers want when they develop products, which leads to great products to solve big problems faced by customers. But then there are breakthrough products which come along every now and then which no one expected or asked for. Apple is known for doing that all the time. No one asked for or expected an iPod to fit every pocket and budget, nor did anyone imagine an iPhone to revolutionize the cellphone industry. Both solved big customer problems like organizing their music in a cool device and putting a little powerful device in their pocket that can have a few dozen necessary applications (and can be used for talking) respectively. But had Apple asked customers what they want from the company, it is quite possible that they would have remained Apple Computers satisfying the need of their niche market.

So one might wonder how Apple, or for that matter any company that comes up with breakthrough innovation, does that? I believe by putting themselves in the customers’ shoes. If you develop a product that you would love to have, something that makes your life easier, something that solves some major problems for you, the chances are your customers will love to have that product as well. All you need is honesty, persistence and self critical observation.

And what about listening to customers? That’s post version uno. You put the breakthrough product out there and now let the customer chip in to tell you how you can improve it and make better to fit their needs. Then you form the maven force to help you deliver breakthrough products and great customer focused innovation.

in 2006, $400 billion was spent on advertising worldwide. Most of this budget went on traditional media like television, radio and print. Companies with billions in advertising budget make sure that their message reaches as big a population as possible. On traditional medium, spending is directly proportional to reach and frequency. It is like using an amplifier and reaching as many people as frequently as possible.

But what if you don’t have (or want to) spend billions in doing this? That’s where intelligence in advertising kicks in. The factors like who, what, when, where and how starts playing a bigger role. Note that it starts playing a bigger role…doesn’t matter how big your marketing budget is, these do come in picture, but when it is small, they sit on the driver’s seat.

When we talk about intelligence in advertising, a couple points are considered most important. First, using proper targeting. You don’t have to reach everyone everywhere. If you are selling office supplies, you don’t have to bother homemakers and retired citizens. When you are selling dorm room goodies you know who your target audience is and return to school is probably the best time to reach them. The idea is to reach the right people at the right time using the right message and the right medium.

Second thing to consider when designing intelligent advertising is new media. If traditional media is all about shouting (one-way), new media is all about talking (two-way). If on traditional media budget is directly proportional to reach and frequency, on new media intelligence is directly proportional to influence and impact. Using new media you can form a bond with your customers. Using social media, you can understand what your customers want. You can make them feel valued, have a healthy dialog and take in their input. The idea is to have a conversation instead of a campaign, because campaigns start and end,but conversations go on forever.

Outsourcing the right thing to the right vendor can make you a leaner and better operating business. But an important question to ask here is what can and cannot be outsourced? Call centers, software development, design, testing, advertising…well it depends. Each one of these can be outsourced, but that depends on what you want your brand to be known about.

Whatever you want your brand to be known about cannot be outsourced. If you want to make your brand to be known about customer service, you cannot outsource customer service. If you want your brand to be known about great design, you got to have design in-house. If creative advertisements is what your brand is all about, outsource something else and keep that in-house.

We outsource something for a couple of reasons. First, to save cost. If your brand is known for something, you don’t have to (and you should not try to) aggressively save cost in that domain. There are plenty of opportunities to cut costs or eliminate cost centers which can be better managed by outsourcing. This brings us to the second reason for outsourcing something. It’s to use the expertise of the company to which you are outsourcing the job. Now applying it back to what you are outsourcing, if you want your brand to be known about something, you are better off developing expertise in that domain as compared to outsourcing it. On the other hand, if you have a back office, it is a good idea to outsource it to someone for whom it is the front office and leverage their expertise.

Branding in simple words is connecting a name with a product. Companies take various approaches to attain this task. One of the most fascinating approaches is to go for subtle branding. To put it simply, subtle branding is to take on a bigger issue and go after it with your brand in the background. The intent is to identify a purpose and make your brand the driving force behind it which would lead people to associate your brand, consciously or sub-consciously, with that larger-than-product purpose.

Using a creative approach, you can make almost any product to fit the bill. If you are in business of selling bags, broaden the horizon and link it to tourism. If your product is nicotine tablets, make anti-smoking as your purpose. If you are a retail bank, subtle brand it by picking up money management initiative. The basic idea is to expand the canvas. Every product has a purpose…it is there to solve a problem.

A necessary ingredient for this kind of branding effort is persistence. The idea here is to develop trust. You cannot expect people to instantly link a brand to a purpose. Like in any other case, building that trust requires time and a continuous effort.

What’s the most important thing to keep in mind while doing subtle branding? It’s the authenticity. If you are associating your brand with a purpose, make sure you put the purpose before your product. Faking purpose-driven branding is not possible in the long run. Your customers are too smart to identify the fake and such attempts can lead to a permanent dent in the brand image. An authentic subtle branding has a strong impact in developing your brand image, and above all, it will help you as an organization fill in for your social responsibility.

Any organization goes for a software solution in one of three ways: build it in-house, buy from a vendor or use Software-as-a-Service from an expert service provider. Here’s an analysis of each one of these options:

• Build it in-house: If you are in business of software development, this is the route you should choose. When you are building a software in-house, you will need to develop, maintain and upgrade software as required. If you are not in the business of software development, why create a back office to build this software solution? Software applications are continuously evolving. Technology gets better every year. So if you go for the in-house option, you will have to carry additional overhead of maintaining and upgrading the software throughout its lifetime.
  Now let’s talk about the hardware side. If you decide to build the software in-house, you will have to go through the IT hurdles to get it hosted and maintained in-house. The Moore’s law of computing (which states that the processing power of hardware will double every 18 months) is still true and is expected to be true at least in the visible future. So if you choose to go for the in-house option, you will have to mess with IT department for upgrading the hardware every other year in order to keep your system up-to-date and state-of-the-art.
• Buy from a vendor: If you buy from a vendor you successfully avoid creating a back office for developing the software, but what about maintenance and upgrades? You can manage maintenance by giving contract to the vendor who built the software for you. As for upgrades, you will require an in-house experts to know when to get upgrades and whom to court to do that. Along with this, dealing with the vendors can be an expensive and distractive process. Even further, the issues of data security and persistence, bandwidth and performance still exists.
  As far as the hardware end is concerned, all the problems that are in building it in-house persists in this option as well.
• Software-as-a-Service: If you go for Software-as-a-Service, you are off-loading your software and hardware problems to an expert service provider. In other words, the back office that you might have otherwise created is replaced by the front office of this service provider. So what are you left with here? That’s your core competencies, your front office. With the software and hardware hurdles out of the way, you can completely focus on your core competencies.

SaaS is the only option where you can completely concentrate on your core competencies. So for software solutions, go SaaS!

In this connected world, every company is required to have a social presence. A great way to do that is by creating a social network, but an important thing to ask is what is the social network for? There should be a clear strategy behind creating a social network. This in-turn will help you justify the investment in nurturing the network, developing a success matrix and calculating the return on investment. The vast array of issues that can be addressed by a social network makes the resource allocation a more intriguing task.

There’s no magic formula for making a successful social network, but here are some points we should keep in mind to increase the chances of success:

1. Connection to your core business: The social network should have a clear connection to your core business. The easiest way to make sure you get this right is by making sure the customers of your product or service are the customers of the social network. Even if you are not talking about the product directly, by having this crucial link you can make sure that the social network is subtly marketing the product to the target audience.
2. Scope of the network: It is very important to answer a simple question: why will anyone come to our network? And even more important, why will anyone come again to our network? This question leads to defining the right scope for the network. While defining a social network, an organization should try and expand the canvas. There are very few products out there about which people are passionate enough to spend time on a social network, but there are way too many issues and topics of interest that can pull people to your network. It is better to talk about quit smoking than nicotine tablets, travel and tourism than luggage, and running and hiking than shoes.
3. Drive to closure: The importance of usefulness of social network is comparable to the importance of having a social presence. The best way to make a social network useful is by having closure for the discussions. Driving issues to closure and making important decisions based on discussions at the network will encourage customers to participate in the discussions  and develop brand loyalty.
4. Alignment to support the network: It is important for all relevant parts of the company ranging from product development to customer support and advertising to align in order to support the network. The social network is one of the most direct ways for an organization to get in touch with its customers. By aligning these different divisions, an organization can make the most out of  the social network.

The network should have the magnet required to attract customers and the glue required to make them stick to it. A network for the sake of it will never work, but a network that adds some value to your customers will do wonders for your brand.

Nike, BMW, Starbucks, Apple, Obama are the iconic brands we talk about all the time. When we develop marketing plan for our product, we leave several marketing ideas by categorizing them as the ones that work only for iconic brands. This brings about a very important question: how did these brands become iconic? Were they born iconic or the way they were marketed and developed made them iconic?

In 1964, Philip Knight, a track athlete and his coach founded a company named Blue Ribbon Sports that operated as a distributor of a Japanese Shoemaker selling shoes at track meets out of Knight’s automobile. A couple years later BRS opened its first retail outlet and few years after that launched its own line of shoes. In 1978, 14 years after first starting business, BRS renamed itself to Nike. In 1980s Nike expanded its product line through in house development and acquisitions, launched its legendary campaign “Just Do It” (1988) and gained major market share. It took more than three decades for Nike to become “Nike”, the iconic sports brand.

Nike was not born iconic, neither were BMW, Starbucks, Apple, Obama and for that matter any other company. Starbucks started with one store in Seattle’s Pike Place market, Apple was just another start-up in Silicon Valley in early 1980s and Obama was about 30 points behind Clinton days before Iowa democratic primary. But all of them worked their way through to reach to the top and become iconic. They were able to do one thing perfectly,  and that is linking an idea to the product. They were able to brand themselves as the first choice for a cult, gather a group of mavens and enter mainstream with their help.

So next time when you plan a campaign, try to go for something that can attract a group of dedicated mavens, try something that can help you define a cult around your brand. Nothing out there works only for iconic brands, but there’s a lot out there to help you make your brand iconic.

We live in an atomic world. We buy one song at a time from iTunes, reach to that one editorial piece out of a zillion using Google, buy one mobile application using app store and buy that one electronic accessory or a missing dinner plate in a dining set from Ebay. Apple, Google, Ebay and the likes have done a great job in dicing the world as per their customer’s demands. This piece-by-piece concept has taken over the concept of selling packaged solutions.

How one can survive and thrive in this atomic world? I believe in order to break the code of the atomic world, we need to focus on two things. First, focus on a niche. You cannot provide everything to everyone, but you can fulfill some atomic need of your niche customer set.

Second, everything you put out there should be perfect. You cannot bet on the bundle being attractive because people don’t care about the bundling any more. People choose to make there own collection by choosing one piece at a time. Similarly, when you are creating a website, you cannot just create just an attractive homepage and leave the inside pages mediocre because nine out of ten people reach to any page on your website using a search engine.

In a nutshell, for success in the atomic world, do less, but whatever you do, be the best!

…with the help of social media.

Market research, product development, marketing, sales and support. Every company, non-profit, political campaign, government or for that matter any other type of organization you can think of undertake these tasks. A corporation might be selling something completely different from what a political campaign is selling, a non-profit organization might be promoting a distinct cause and a government might be organizing affairs of size varying from a city council to a country, the commonality lies in doing proper market research, developing the right product or message and selling it to their audience.

Now let’s talk how each one of these can be done better with the help of social media.

1. Market research: Market research is basically listening to what your customers have to say about your product (or service). With the growing influence of social media, people are already talking about you. If the conversation is already happening, then what better way to do market research than continuously monitoring it? To take it a step further, organizations can create monitored communities online and link it to wide array of social networks on the web. Researchers can continuously stir the pot, attract audience to their community and analyze the results to take concrete decisions. To put it simply, think of it as an effective focus group 24/7!
2. Development: The breakthrough product ideas are the ones that are embraced by your customers. Product development involves activities like brainstorming on ideas, finding out what’s missing, what problem you are trying to solve and so on. By creating moderated communities enhanced by an effective workflow management system, product managers can lead open discussions with their customers and amongst their customers into brilliant product ideas.
3. Marketing: Marketing at the end boils down to talking to your audience and  gauging their needs. With the help of social media, marketeers can take marketing closer to their target base. They can create communities loaded with quick polls and analysis to stimulate two-way conversations with their customers and amongst customers. These communities can evolve marketing efforts to focus more on collaborating with the audience and less on broadcasting to them.
   Marketeers can do effective branding using the power of social media. Online communities take subtle branding to a whole new level. An organization can create a community to expand the canvas by taking on the larger cause addressed by their product. These communities can act as a support system for the people trying to solve a problem and in-turn help brand the product authoritatively and effectively.
4. Sales: The strength of a sales force is said to be directly proportional to the passion of people in it. If that’s true, then what better way to strengthen the force than by adding the group of passionate mavens to it? An organization can create a community to provide a home base to the network of mavens and make them feel part of the organization. By entertaining this base and providing them enough resources, the organization can develop a super powerful sales force that can help them in their task, whether it is crossing the chasm or sustaining their customer base.
5. Support: Customer service and support have become vital parts of any organization. In the world connected by social networks, how an organization handles support can make or break a brand. The effectiveness of forums and discussion boards is already visible in this area. Organizations can add more effectiveness to the online support system by effectively monitoring it and bringing issues to closure in a timely fashion, of course with the help of mavens!

The other day I was listening to Jeff Bezos on Charlie Rose where he drew great analogies between a digital camera on cellphone and e-book reader on cellphone followed by an even more interesting one between cloud computing and electricity. The first one was to compare how an e-book reader on cell phone will affect Kindle’s market. Bezos compared e-book reading to photography. His argument was that people won’t trade a feature-rich digital camera specifically for photography with a simple digital camera on mobile phone, but they still like to have a camera on their mobile to take some pictures at places they don’t carry their digital camera. Similarly, they won’t trade a Kindle with e-book reader on cellphone, but would love to have some reading device on their cellphone for quick catch-up reading. This argument make so much more sense, and speaks volumes about Kindle’s market positioning, with the help of a comparison with something that is already happening out there today.

Another analogy he drew was while explaining the future of cloud computing. Bezos explained it by drawing a straight comparison between cloud computing and electricity. About a century back companies had their own electricity generator plants but as electric grids matured they abandoned their own electricity generation with pay-as-you-use model on electric grid. This helped them save costs and focus on their core expertise and service to their customers without worrying about how to get electricity to support their plants. Similarly by letting companies that are expert in running data centers take care of your computing infrastructure and let you focus on your core expertise is what cloud computing’s selling proposition. A simple analogy from a century ago to explain the future!

I believe nothing adds more substance to an argument than a properly drawn analogy. It is like a proof to an argument which makes your pitch more believable and give people an authentic reason (or can we say, an alibi) to buy your argument.

Surveys are one of the most common ways to do mass market research. While they do a great job of asking the exact questions an organization wants to get answered, they are as good as the seriousness and credibility of the people answering the questions. Most surveys are one-time communications with rare follow-ups. People don’t know how their input is getting used and whether filling it out is worth their time. I believe the biggest concern with surveys is that they are open-ended.

How can we make surveys more interesting and effective? By providing a means to provide closure to what you are trying to find through these surveys. Researchers trying to find out information should link the surveys to an online community controlled by them. This community will have a workflow mechanism to help them show the progress of issues being asked in the questionnaire. Looking at the progress on specific questions they answered in the survey will make people more interested in filling them with sincerity because now they know that their input is really making a difference.

Linking surveys to a controlled community will fix another major issue faced by the researchers. It’s often seen that surveys are not able to attract the most insightful customers. Mavens tend to avoid filling surveys because of the nature of these surveys being pre-planned and not up for open discussions and collaboration. Researchers can put out the most interest generating topics in the survey out on their community to generate effective communications and collaborate with the customers. This will provide mavens a way to have two-way communication with the organization and researchers can effectively use these discussions to make better decisions. By implementing these decisions and communicating them to the network they will be able to excite the customers and close the loop!